The excitement is building here as Rome prepares for tomorrow's canonizations of Pope John XXIII and Pope John Paul II. I took this snapshot yesterday mid-morning at St. Peter's Basilica.
There wasn't even an event happening and they already had to close the streets to car traffic because of the influx of pilgrims. Predictions I've heard of the total number of pilgrims expected to come to Rome for the canonization vary from 800,000 to 7 million! That's quite a range! We'll see what happens tomorrow. One thing is for sure – there will be a tremendous outpouring of God's grace and mercy on this most historic of Divine Mercy Sundays!
Last night, as you know, the Easter Proclamation, called the Exsultet ("Exult!"), was proclaimed at Easter Vigils around the world. After our 40 days of Lenten preparation, the proclamation is a magnificent outpouring of the Universal Church's pure joy at the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is my favorite moment of the year, and, really, the definitive moment for all time and creation, proclaimed anew each year. Soak in the joy below. God bless you! And Happy Easter!
Exult, let them exult, the hosts of heaven,
exult, let
Angel ministers of God exult,
let the trumpet
of salvation
sound aloud our
mighty King’s triumph!
Be glad, let
earth be glad, as glory floods her,
ablaze with
light from her eternal King,
let all corners
of the earth be glad,
knowing an end
to gloom and darkness.
Rejoice, let
Mother Church also rejoice,
arrayed with
the lightning of his glory,
let this holy
building shake with joy,
filled with the
mighty voices of the peoples.
Therefore,
dearest friends,
standing in the
awesome glory of this holy light,
invoke with me,
I ask you,
the mercy of
God almighty,
that he, who
has been pleased to number me,
though
unworthy, among the Levites,
may pour into
me his light unshadowed,
that I may sing
this candle’s perfect praises.
V.
The Lord be with you.
R.
And with your spirit.
V.
Lift up your hearts.
R.
We lift them up to the Lord.
V.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
R.
It is right and just.
It is truly
right and just,
with ardent
love of mind and heart
and with
devoted service of our voice,
to acclaim our
God invisible, the almighty Father,
and Jesus
Christ, our Lord, his Son, his Only Begotten.
Who for our
sake paid Adam’s debt to the eternal Father,
and, pouring
out his own dear Blood,
wiped clean the
record of our ancient sinfulness.
These, then,
are the feasts of Passover,
in which is
slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb,
whose Blood
anoints the doorposts of believers.
This is the
night,
when once you led
our forebears, Israel’s children,
from slavery in
Egypt
and made them
pass dry-shod through the Red Sea.
This is the
night
that with a
pillar of fire
banished the
darkness of sin.
This is the
night
that even now,
throughout the world,
sets Christian
believers apart from worldly vices
and from the
gloom of sin,
leading them to
grace
and joining
them to his holy ones.
This is the
night,
when Christ
broke the prison-bars of death
and rose
victorious from the underworld.
Our birth would
have been no gain,
had we not been
redeemed.
O wonder of
your humble care for us!
O love, O
charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a
slave you gave away your Son!
O truly
necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed
completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned so
great, so glorious a Redeemer!
O truly blessed
night,
worthy alone to
know the time and hour
when Christ
rose from the underworld!
This is the
night
of which it is
written:
The night shall
be as bright as day,
dazzling is the
night for me,
and full of
gladness.
The sanctifying
power of this night
dispels
wickedness, washes faults away,
restores
innocence to the fallen, and joy to mourners,
drives out
hatred, fosters concord, and brings down the mighty.
"And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom; and the earth shook, and the rocks were split." (Mt 27:50)
The thunder of the powers of darkness seems to be ringing out this evening in Zaragoza, Spain. I am here on pilgrimage after a very blessed retreat in Loyola, Spain, where St. Ignatius had his conversion. (Thank you for your prayers!)
Every Holy Week, Spain's streets come alive with colorful processions that mark the events of Christ's Passion, death, and Resurrection. In between the usual liturgies of Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday, hundreds of members of religious brotherhoods here parade the streets with floats that depict scenes from Christ's Passion. They accompany their floats with a steady and deafening beat of drums that fills the city all day long.
As I listen this evening (now past midnight!), I can't help but relate the noise of the drums with the apparent victory that the chaotic powers of darkness celebrated today, thinking they successfully killed God. In fact, we know that by his death, Christ destroys Death and claims for us the definitive victory over sin and evil. But tonight, the drums beat in mocking pride – not yet aware of how hollow they will sound come Sunday.
Interestingly, the drummers hood themselves in "capirotes" that look to American eyes a lot like the hoods of the Ku Klux Klan. But the hoods here were traditionally worn by penitents who, in medieval times, would walk the streets in these "dunce caps" to be mocked and spat upon, while preserving their anonymity. Fused with the beat of the drums, the hoods now seem to signify the penitence we all share for wounding Christ with our sins and our desire to stand in solidarity with him who, for our sake, did not shield his face "from buffets and spitting." (Isaiah 50:6)
As we move into Holy Saturday, the day when all the earth stands still in quiet expectation of Jesus' Resurrection, let us not forget that whatever drums might be beating incessantly in apparent victory in our lives, none are too great for God to silence in His own time and in His own wisdom. Indeed, as the Psalmist puts it,
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult." (Ps 46:1-3)
As anticipated, life has gotten quite busy as Lent comes to a head and the holy days of Christ's Passion, death, and Resurrection come fast upon us.
As if (and surely it is) by God's good Providence, I happen to have scheduled my annual retreat at the precise moment when all the busyness and noise of life was seeming to crescendo to an unappeasable pitch. So, I now turn off the radio of life for a time, and turn to answer the Lord's call given to his disciples in the sixth chapter of Mark's Gospel:
30 The apostles returned to Jesus, and
told him all that they had done and taught. 31 And he said to
them, “Come away by yourselves to a lonely place, and rest a while.” For many
were coming and going, and they had no leisure even to eat. 32 And
they went away in the boat to a lonely place by themselves.
Please pray for me as I now enter into retreat, and be assured of my prayers for all of you.
This morning we made the epic hike out to the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. One of the four major basilicas of Rome, it is located "outside the walls" of the ancient city of Rome because that is where they used to bury their dead in order the keep the stench and contagion of death away from the center of town.
St. Paul was buried here after being martyred for his faithful witness to Jesus Christ, and a series of churches and eventually the present-day basilica was built over the site. Because of his Roman citizenship, Paul suffered a much "cleaner" death than his comrade St. Peter suffered in the same city. Paul was beheaded by sword, whereas Peter was crucified upside down. This is one of the reasons Paul is usually depicted carrying a sword – the instrument of his death. He also bears it in testament to the line traditionally attributed to him in the Letter to the Hebrews, 4:12: "[T]he word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart."
History comes alive in places like these. In the Year of St. Paul (2008-2009), a fresh excavation and study of the site of St. Paul's tomb was done. Immediately under the high altar of the basilica, they found a sarcophagus with a rough inscription on the cover that reads, "Paul Apostle Martyr" in Latin. Inside were 1st century bone fragments, along with fragments of purple cloth lined with gold – the same kind of royal material that the bones of St. Peter were found to be wrapped in when an excavation of his tomb (under the high altar of St. Peter's basilica) was done during World War II.
Around the corner, in one of the exhibits featured at St. Paul's basilica, is a collection of the coins that were found in and around the tomb during this same excavation. The faithful used to toss coins on the tomb as a sign of connection to the site and as a small offering of faith – much as we might toss coins in a fountain today. The genius of this, of course, archaeologically, is that the coins give the tomb a precise timeline down through the centuries. The oldest coin is one from the Republic of Rome, dating to 217-215 BC, which would be like our tossing an old penny from the 1800's. (Whoops! Should have kept that one – might have been worth something!).
I found the most interesting coin to be one from the reign of Caesar Augustus – part of a minting that was done between 27 BC and 14 AD. This mint of coin (pictured below) is the same one that Jesus most likely was looking at when he famously told the Pharisees and Herodians to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's! (Mt 22:15-22)
The Word of God is indeed living and true! . . . down through the ages . . . not only in coins and excavations that link us directly back to the time when Jesus and his apostles actually walked the face of the earth, but even more so, and more importantly, in our hearts and minds when we allow our lives to be infused by its transforming light.
